


fitting pieces

by More_night



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Kissing, M/M, Sharing a Bed, a classic drafted-edited-posted-the-same-day feels-venting oneshot, and finally, canon sneaking to unbugged places, handjob, sharing decontamination procedures, sharing radiation exposure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 12:46:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19107391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_night/pseuds/More_night
Summary: Two times Boris saw Valery naked, and one time he didn't. (The (little) plot is basically in the tags.)





	fitting pieces

 

* * *

 

 

**1.**

The first time Boris sees him naked, Valery looks like a worm, pale, dug out of its hole and exposed to daylight.

He remembers how he used to think that scientists were snob, infatuated little creatures, hunched in their labs, prompt to criticism, and otherwise entirely useless. He no longer thinks that; at least, not about Valery. Valery who could not lie to save his life, although he has lied and he will keep doing so, because they all do. Valery whose weakness is to think truth is enough to make things happen--it's not. Everyday Boris has to remind him of that.

In late May, Valery and he go on a survey of an area immediately to the west of reactor 4. The sector should already have been surveyed. The only thing they are searching for is some access to the lower roof section.

They make their way through concrete and rubble, twisted metal and stone. They are wearing khakis now most of the time--even though they wash their clothing after every wear in water brought in from beyond the exclusion zone, it still scores at 2 or 3 roetgen the next morning, so instead of washing it they trash it every night, and they soon run out of shirts, pants and ties.

"Stop," Valery says suddenly. It's Valery's ordering voice, the one that makes Boris clench his teeth everytime, because he should be the one giving orders here. Yet he stops.

"What?"

Valery's hard gaze at his dosimeter tells him what.

"188 roetgen," Valery says. He steps forward.

"Valery. Stop. We'll send the soldiers back with lead protection."

Valery keeps moving. "256. 313."

Boris looks down at his own dosimeter, hanging at his belt. The number reads 164 where he is. They've shut off the sound because the clicking is constant in these parts.

Valery stops in front of a pile of rubble taller than himself. "624."

Boris moves quickly. He doesn't look at the dosimeter at all. He grabs Valery by the arm and takes him back, strongly enough to make him stumble.

They rush back to the command trailers. "There's graphite in that pile of rubble," Valery says, panting, on their way.

"I know."

"We'll need--"

"To redo the fucking survey, yes--I'll take care of it."

For now, they have to act quickly. They're barely by the trailers when Valery stops dead in his tracks. He removes his hat, unbuckles his belt and starts unbuttoning the khaki shirt.

"What are you doing?"

"Our clothes are contaminated. We have to take them off."

Boris's heart beats faster. For a moment, he cannot move. One step closer to death, again.

Valery's voice takes him out of it. "Off. Everything. Now!"

Soldiers are running their way in the long lead-lined aprons, masks on. The air itself seems to gather thickly around them. Time freezes.

Boris can't recall the last time he has been naked in front of other men. It casts him back to boyhood. Gymnasiums, showers before work, showers after work. He was stronger, taller, broader than everyone, had always been. He could do anything he wanted, take advantage of whoever he wanted; he won fights, got into fights, threatened to fight others all the time.

He cannot help but look, but after all, all of them are looking. Valery's skin is pale like the white film of clouds above their heads. Like he lives deep in the ground, never glimpses the sun. His shoulders, his chest, even his thighs are covered in freckles. His limbs are frail yet not quite, like those who work sitting at a desk and don't walk anything else than the four blocks to their office. His body hair is a strange shade of blonde, some of it red, like his hair. (It flashes to Boris's mind--they're gonna loose that too, aren't they? Valery's voice, with the shy tone it has when he tells a truth he knows people don't want to hear: "Eventually.") Valery is flushed from running back and now shivering in the cool air.

The soldiers have stopped some distance around the two Moscow men, standing among the rubble, naked as the day they were born. None of them talks. They're scared; everyone's scared.

Valery points at the pile of clothing between Boris and himself. "These need to be put with contaminated material." A look at Boris. "And we need to be decontaminated."

Decontamination takes place in a nearby tent, connected to a truck full of clean water. They step together under the spray. It's so cold it makes his balls want to hide inside his body.

Boris catches Valery's gaze. Valery's eyes flicker away immediately. They have shared everything--but not this.

They sit outside after, wrapped in a blanket waiting for a new set of khakis from wherever they're stored.

Valery's hand palms his naked chest in a reflex motion. "Does anyone..." Valery tries. His voice doesn't even carry. Boris hears his teeth clattering in the cold.

"You," he bellows to a nearby soldier. "A cigarette for Comrade Legasov."

The soldier--a boy, 20 years old, a redhead like Valery--comes forward, hands Valery the whole pack and his lighter. Valery thanks him with a forced, mousy smile that seems like an apology.

He lights the cigarette with shaking fingers. Boris surveils every motion--how Valery rubs his fingertips together, how deeply he breathes in the smoke, how the inhalation appeases him, softens his brow, how at peace he looks, for a second. Valery notices Boris's look; he frowns a little, but then he just lets him look.

Now there is truly nothing they don't know about each other.

 

 

 

**2.**

The second time he doesn't see Valery entirely naked. At least, not most of him--they barely undress.

Boris returns to the command suite at the Polissya Hotel. "I've spoken with Pikal-..."

\--the room's empty. But there's an untouched cup of tea, a half-eaten dinner and Valery's glasses, left on the blueprints sprawled on the table.

He finds Valery in the adjacent bedroom. They never use it--each of them has their own room--and the door's closed most of the time. Inside, Valery's curled up on the still-made bed, on his left side, with his hands tucked between his knees, at the very edge of the mattress, like he's sorry he's there--or like he'd rather be anywhere. 

Seeing Valery asleep does to Boris the same thing seeing him afraid does--reminding him he should be afraid too, reminding him he should sleep, curled on top of a dark orange coverlet, hidden away. He doesn't really remember when they last took a break to sleep--it's afternoon now. He doesn't think much about it--suddenly every bit of him is exhausted.

He toes off his shoes, puts them besides Valery's by the door.

He lies down on his back. Valery's shoulder gives a twitch when Boris's weight settles down on the bed, but he doesn't wake.

Boris crosses his hands on his chest and falls asleep in a second, like that.

He wakes in a blink. The light coming through the drawn curtains has changed, so it must have been a few hours. He is on his left side now, his right hand gripping the pillow. But that is not what he notices most.

Valery is awake too. On his side, still, a hand under his head, and facing Boris this time.

 _Get up. Get up now_. But Boris doesn't move. For a moment, every stupid thing outside could die, and burn, and melt. Like it will.

He should not notice that Valery's eyes are a peculiar blue, almost grey. Maybe it was the glasses stopping him, but he had never noticed before. It would cost nothing to Valery to make these eyes look hardened and steeled--like they're barely human, like a dog's eyes. But maybe Valery could never do that. Maybe it would be the hardest thing in the world for him. He should not notice how they look either--but he does. For the first time, Valery's eyes don't have that frightened shine they always have, like he's trapped, like he's searching for nothing else but a way out--and there's no way out.

He should not notice how empty his mind has gone. He should say something, ask Valery what time it is, if he's alright, tell him they have to get back to work now, tell him what Pikalov wanted them to know.

But he says nothing.

"Are you alright?" Valery asks him.

"Stop asking me that." He meant to say it gruffly, but his voice breaks.

Valery does what he does when he starts to smile a little, then holds himself back. Boris should not wish that Valery do not hold himself back. But he does--oh, he does.

They're more naked now than they've ever been. Disasters do that. People are broken together, fall apart together, try and pick the pieces together. Sometime, maybe they mistake a piece of someone else for their own. Put it where they think it'll fit and it doesn't--or it does, but better. Boris wishes he had Valery's heart, bound to the truth like a compass to the north, because it can't help it. Funny, how he didn't even think of truth before he came to Chernobyl. It didn't seem important, never crossed his mind.

He stops thinking of the truth altogether when Valery moves his left hand to the collar of Boris's shirt.

Valery's fingers stay still on the button there. His eyes are full of questions.

Boris doesn't say anything.

Valery undoes the button.

Boris should want Valery to stop. He hasn't wanted those things since so long. He thought he had forgotten. It was from boyhood, adolescence--stares and longings that he stifled easily. But strange things happen all the time here: there's a lake of lava two miles away that's sinking into the ground still, until the liquid nitrogen freezes it into a cooling block that'll emit waves of death for centuries.

Valery's hand moves down, undoes the rest of the buttons--fumbling occasionally.

"Tell me to stop," Valery says.

The offer is half a command, half a plea. It snaps like something feral in Boris. He stops wishing he should not want, and he begins to want immensely. The way he'd want a fight, sudden and mighty like his will has nothing to do with it.

"Don't tell me what to do," he says. He meant to erect this as a last barrier, but instead it makes all other dams fall.

He goes for Valery's belt. Valery's expression is shocked for a mili-second, then his lips part and he begins to breathe audibly in the space between them. Boris feels inside Valery's pants, through the underwear first. He doesn't know what he expected exactly, but Valery feels bigger than that, already half-hard. Valery's breath catches when Boris reaches inside. He strokes up and down two, three times, before Valery slips his right hand from under the pillow, and moves to undo Boris's belt. His motions bring a single, high-pitched creak from the mattress under them.

Boris freezes, Valery's cock in his hand. Then he gestures at the room around them, lips pressed together thinly. Valery nods, quick, penitent always. It infuriates Boris--how the mattress's revealing sound (and the bugs, and the KGB, hundreds of miles away in Moscow) turns Valery back into obedience. Gone is the wild creature--it tries to look domesticated again, knowing it fails.

Then, Valery sighs when Boris starts to stroke again, cautious this time. There is something wild about it, about Valery, about this, now. It crosses Boris's mind that this could be the radiation. After all, it's supposed to alter them, change their DNA. Would it be so odd that it would make them do that too? That it would do that to the mind? Make them want crazy things? Valery's hand finds him and Boris groans softly, as silently as he can.

In this too, Valery seems to know more than him: his motion is swift, precise and quiet on Boris, even though he's using his bad hand. Boris goes more slowly, a bit more roughly perhaps, but Valery tenses with every stroke, from toes to head. Sweat forms at his temples, his eyes are closed and his mouth is open. His breath shakes out of him. Oh yeah, he looks naked now. Boris reaches for him with his free hand, takes hold of the nape of Valery's neck, his hair. Not naked, raw. Radiation takes the skin off, doesn't it?

Boris comes in a surprise, smooth and quick. As he does his fingers tighten their hold on Valery's hair. Valery purses his lips tightly and moans low in his throat, then he comes too, slick on Boris's fingers in the confines of his underwear. His body was taut like a bow, and suddenly he has gone soft against Boris, like a blanket in a heap.

They wipe their fingers on their underwear. They both need to change anyway.

Boris avoids Valery's eyes, because he knows he'll find them downcast, shy. But he cannot help it when he catches Valery staring. "Don't apologize," he says.

"I wasn't planning to," Valery says. How calm and steady his voice is makes Boris look up. Valery is sitting on the bed, his hair flattened and angled from the pillow, his face looking oddly younger without the glasses. He hasn't fixed his clothing; his shirt is partly undone and his pants are open. He is candid and plain.

It is Boris's turn to look away.

 

 

 

**3.**

Boris finds it. It used to be some kind of bookstore, or study room, maybe part of a school--most of the books are gone, maybe someone came afterwards and took them, if they could, maybe someone left with them, maybe there'd never been any.

"Are you sure it's safe?"

"Let's see." Boris clears his throat. "Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbatchev is a donkey-loving idiot who'd suck Ronald Reagan's dick in a minute," Boris says, declaring every word.

Valery has frozen, his hands in the pockets of his coat.

"See?" Boris says after a moment of silence.

Valery shakes his head. "Well, we wouldn't know right now--would we?"

Boris sighs. "Yes, I'm sure it's safe."

For a moment, Valery just looks around. It must have been something like a study room, definitely. In a corner, there's a small pile of books, forgotten there, children's books, all colors and bright pages. They're covered in dust now. Water from summer downpours came in through the wide open door and brought rivulets of ground and small stones from the street. Empty shelves line the walls.

Boris walks to Valery.

"What did you want to talk about?" Valery asks. He fetches in his pocket for his cigarettes, puts one between his lips.

Boris keeps walking until his chest touches Valery's, then he keeps walking until Valery has backed into the shelves behind him.

Valery's cigarette hangs unlit from his lips. Boris takes it and slips it in his pocket.

"Take off your glasses," he whispers.

Valery does. Boris kisses him.

Valery starts back a little at first. He must not have expected this--as if he'd expected anything when they both arrived here. They've brought each other off a handful of times, always quick and quiet. Valery used his mouth on Boris once, leaving him weak-legged in the command suite's small kitchen. But this, not ever.

Boris goes softly at it, like Valery is precious and cracked open. Like Boris is holding him together. Valery tilts his head back and Boris pushes in and closer. Valery holds him tight and kisses fervently.

This is something else, of course. They know it when they part and when Boris touches their foreheads together, when Valery rubs his nose against his. Something else entirely.

"I didn't think you were like that," Valery says, mouthing it in the collar of Boris's coat.

"Like what?"

Valery looks up. He doesn't look sorry--he rarely does now--he looks like something else, almost desperate. "Like me."

Boris runs his hand in Valery's hair, thumbs at his ear. "I'm nothing like you, Valera," he says. "I wish I were. But I'm not. I'm an old, scared, dying man."

Valery kisses him, open-eyed.

 

* * *

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I have no idea if they needed to change their clothes that often. 
> 
> 2\. I have no idea if you can switch off the sound on a Soviet-made (or for that matter any) dosimeter from the era (or any era).
> 
> 3\. i needed that out of my system, thank you for putting up with me.


End file.
